Apologies to Louisiana. East of Lafayette, there is an 18-mile long elevated highway that traverses the most beautiful swamp. I believe it’s called the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge and one of the most wonderful things about it is that trucks are limited to the right hand lane for its length and the speed limit is also reduced so there is an instant mellowing out and a person can enjoy the scenery. This stretch of highway is a tourist attraction in itself and shows the face of Louisiana that one has come to expect: bayous, trees growing out of the water, swamps with cypress knees. No wonder the state calls itself “America’s Wetland.”
Coming into Baton Rouge, we reached a major milestone—we crossed the Mississippi River. Now we really felt like we were in the eastern part of the country. We headed north to Natchez, Mississippi. Our intention was to drive the Natchez Trace Parkway and we would begin at the southern end, just outside of Natchez. As we approached the Mississippi state line, the highway started to undulate—we were going up and down actual hills. I’m not sure if I dwelt on the fact that southern Louisiana is flat, flat, flat. All those bayous are pretty much sea level and the tallest thing you see is a bridge over the intercoastal waterway. Now we not only had hills, we had forests, with real trees, a mix of hardwoods and pines that looked to be 60 or 70 feet tall. One of the more interesting things to me was the fact that these forests included magnolia and mimosa trees in bloom. I had always considered these to be trees you bought from the nursery and not actually native to someplace.
Both Louisiana and Mississippi are the land of riding lawnmowers. It seems like everyone has a large yard, mostly unfenced, and you really need a riding mower to keep the jungle at bay. The yards commonly have a lot of nice plantings, daylilies, iris, and zillions of crepe myrtles in colors ranging from the bright pink in the photo of the tree in Luling that was included in an earlier post to white, lighter pink and a couple of shades of purple. Crepe myrtle is used everywhere.
This was also the land of little churches. I have no idea how the congregations can support so many churches, but there was at least one at each crossroads and maybe two, kind of like drugstores in the city. But these would be at crossroads in the middle of nowhere, nothing but a yellow highway sign announcing “Church” to warn you that your soul could be saved just up ahead. There were more kinds of Baptists than you could shake a stick at, Primitive, Free Will, Perfect Life, Bible. This is surely also the land of nitpickers when it comes to theology.
The farther north we went, the more logging trucks we saw, with long skinny logs suitable mostly for pulp or for making OSB. The industry that built the Pacific Northwest migrated here many years ago, where you can harvest trees every 25 years instead of every 80 to 100. I remember Weyerhauser ads and billboards from long ago extolling tree farms as sustainable and now I wonder how you can possibly call a planting to harvest cycle of 80 years “sustainable.”
We stayed at Natchez State Park, a few miles out of the city on a small reservoir. Only three other campsites were occupied when we rolled in and I think the peak occupancy was about seven total rigs. Because we are senior citizens, we paid only $13 a night for the lovely campsite you see in the photo. Of course we didn’t have wifi or a pool, but there was a lot of peace and quiet and nice trees and birds.
Natchez has an enormous visitor center, just across the Mississippi River bridge from Vidalia, LA. This shot was taken from the riverfront in Vidalia showing Natchez-under-the-hill which is just a fancy name for the area where the casino is.
Natchez claims to be the oldest settlement on the Mississippi, excepting New Orleans I would assume. It was never involved in the Civil War, so it has a number of antebellum homes which it markets unmercifully. There are two “pilgrimages” a year, when even more than the usual number of homes are open and there are parties and everyone enjoys dressing up in period costumes, etc. I have a little problem with the whole antebellum home thing, which maybe makes me a curmudgeon, but there it is. Here’s the deal: You have this gracious way of life, the beautiful homes, the lovely ladies dressed in their fancy gowns, the balls and parties, etc. etc. But this was all supported by black slave labor, every single bit of it. Nowadays they give some little nod to the fact, but mostly it’s still swept under the rug, except that I can’t forget it. Even if it didn’t cost $20 per person per home for a tour, I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate that way of life.
In its heyday, Natchez was a commercial center, the destination for goods that came down the river from the Ohio River valley. Before the days of steamboats, a trip down the Mississippi on a boat to carry goods to market was strictly one-way. You had to walk back home. The Natchez Trace is the path that traders followed north on their six-month return journey. It had been used by Indians, explorers, trappers and started out as nothing but a small path through the woods but in the end carried so much traffic that it was a narrow roadway sunken thirty feet into the soft loess soil in places. The present-day Natchez Trace Parkway was envisioned in the thirties and construction begun then but it took another 40 years or so to complete the highway to Nashville TN. It’s a beautiful, wide two lane road with limited access and no commercial traffic, running through the forest. There are numerous historical sites along the route and a fair number of bicyclists. Our original plan had been to drive the length of it, but we found that lovely as it is, there’s not a lot to look at and one mile of beautiful forest looks a lot like the next mile.
So instead of driving the rig north, we left it parked at Natchez State Park and drove up the trace to Vicksburg to visit the battlefield there. Its location on a bluff commanding the Mississippi River gave Vicksburg great strategic importance to both sides in the Civil War. The video and displays at the National Park Service visitor center provide a good overview of the events leading up to the siege of Vicksburg and how things played out. You then get into your car and drive around what had been a fortified city on a hill and get a real appreciation for the challenges that the Union Army faced in trying to attack up these steep slopes in the face of withering fire from the Confederate forces behind the battlements. In the end, the city fell and was pretty much destroyed. For obvious reasons, antebellum mansions aren’t a big feature in Vicksburg.
Coming into Baton Rouge, we reached a major milestone—we crossed the Mississippi River. Now we really felt like we were in the eastern part of the country. We headed north to Natchez, Mississippi. Our intention was to drive the Natchez Trace Parkway and we would begin at the southern end, just outside of Natchez. As we approached the Mississippi state line, the highway started to undulate—we were going up and down actual hills. I’m not sure if I dwelt on the fact that southern Louisiana is flat, flat, flat. All those bayous are pretty much sea level and the tallest thing you see is a bridge over the intercoastal waterway. Now we not only had hills, we had forests, with real trees, a mix of hardwoods and pines that looked to be 60 or 70 feet tall. One of the more interesting things to me was the fact that these forests included magnolia and mimosa trees in bloom. I had always considered these to be trees you bought from the nursery and not actually native to someplace.
Both Louisiana and Mississippi are the land of riding lawnmowers. It seems like everyone has a large yard, mostly unfenced, and you really need a riding mower to keep the jungle at bay. The yards commonly have a lot of nice plantings, daylilies, iris, and zillions of crepe myrtles in colors ranging from the bright pink in the photo of the tree in Luling that was included in an earlier post to white, lighter pink and a couple of shades of purple. Crepe myrtle is used everywhere.
This was also the land of little churches. I have no idea how the congregations can support so many churches, but there was at least one at each crossroads and maybe two, kind of like drugstores in the city. But these would be at crossroads in the middle of nowhere, nothing but a yellow highway sign announcing “Church” to warn you that your soul could be saved just up ahead. There were more kinds of Baptists than you could shake a stick at, Primitive, Free Will, Perfect Life, Bible. This is surely also the land of nitpickers when it comes to theology.
The farther north we went, the more logging trucks we saw, with long skinny logs suitable mostly for pulp or for making OSB. The industry that built the Pacific Northwest migrated here many years ago, where you can harvest trees every 25 years instead of every 80 to 100. I remember Weyerhauser ads and billboards from long ago extolling tree farms as sustainable and now I wonder how you can possibly call a planting to harvest cycle of 80 years “sustainable.”
We stayed at Natchez State Park, a few miles out of the city on a small reservoir. Only three other campsites were occupied when we rolled in and I think the peak occupancy was about seven total rigs. Because we are senior citizens, we paid only $13 a night for the lovely campsite you see in the photo. Of course we didn’t have wifi or a pool, but there was a lot of peace and quiet and nice trees and birds.
Natchez has an enormous visitor center, just across the Mississippi River bridge from Vidalia, LA. This shot was taken from the riverfront in Vidalia showing Natchez-under-the-hill which is just a fancy name for the area where the casino is.
Natchez claims to be the oldest settlement on the Mississippi, excepting New Orleans I would assume. It was never involved in the Civil War, so it has a number of antebellum homes which it markets unmercifully. There are two “pilgrimages” a year, when even more than the usual number of homes are open and there are parties and everyone enjoys dressing up in period costumes, etc. I have a little problem with the whole antebellum home thing, which maybe makes me a curmudgeon, but there it is. Here’s the deal: You have this gracious way of life, the beautiful homes, the lovely ladies dressed in their fancy gowns, the balls and parties, etc. etc. But this was all supported by black slave labor, every single bit of it. Nowadays they give some little nod to the fact, but mostly it’s still swept under the rug, except that I can’t forget it. Even if it didn’t cost $20 per person per home for a tour, I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate that way of life.
In its heyday, Natchez was a commercial center, the destination for goods that came down the river from the Ohio River valley. Before the days of steamboats, a trip down the Mississippi on a boat to carry goods to market was strictly one-way. You had to walk back home. The Natchez Trace is the path that traders followed north on their six-month return journey. It had been used by Indians, explorers, trappers and started out as nothing but a small path through the woods but in the end carried so much traffic that it was a narrow roadway sunken thirty feet into the soft loess soil in places. The present-day Natchez Trace Parkway was envisioned in the thirties and construction begun then but it took another 40 years or so to complete the highway to Nashville TN. It’s a beautiful, wide two lane road with limited access and no commercial traffic, running through the forest. There are numerous historical sites along the route and a fair number of bicyclists. Our original plan had been to drive the length of it, but we found that lovely as it is, there’s not a lot to look at and one mile of beautiful forest looks a lot like the next mile.
So instead of driving the rig north, we left it parked at Natchez State Park and drove up the trace to Vicksburg to visit the battlefield there. Its location on a bluff commanding the Mississippi River gave Vicksburg great strategic importance to both sides in the Civil War. The video and displays at the National Park Service visitor center provide a good overview of the events leading up to the siege of Vicksburg and how things played out. You then get into your car and drive around what had been a fortified city on a hill and get a real appreciation for the challenges that the Union Army faced in trying to attack up these steep slopes in the face of withering fire from the Confederate forces behind the battlements. In the end, the city fell and was pretty much destroyed. For obvious reasons, antebellum mansions aren’t a big feature in Vicksburg.
posted by Al and Linda @ 4:12 PM
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